1. Overview: 6 chapters will be read and presented by 6 teams. This is in order to save time while still studying each chapter in depth.
   • This book is not a tree
   • A question of design
   • Why being “Less bad” is no good
   • Eco-effectiveness
   • Waste equals food
   • Respect Diversity
   • Putting eco-effectiveness into practice

While reading, each team should be thinking about the following questions and after 2 weeks, the material should be fully understood, processed and posted on our course blog.

What are the main points?
What are the problems?
What are the solutions?
What did you learn?

1. Purpose: ‘Cradle to Cradle’ [C2C] is a comprehensive book which outlines many green issues, sustainable living solutions and eco-friendly innovations seen in the 21st century. Reading and digesting this material will assist you to form a strong foundation for your story, design and campaign.
2. Relation to final campaign: Find your source of inspiration for your design.

Cradle To Cradle

William McDonough’s book, written with his colleague, the German chemist Michael Braungart, is a manifesto calling for the transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design. Through historical sketches on the roots of the industrial revolution; commentary on science, nature and society; descriptions of key design principles; and compelling examples of innovative products and business strategies already reshaping the marketplace, McDonough and Braungart make the case that an industrial system that “takes, makes and wastes” can become a creator of goods and services that generate ecological, social and economic value. In Cradle to Cradle, McDonough and Braungart argue that the conflict between industry and the environment is not an indictment of commerce but an outgrowth of purely opportunistic design. The design of products and manufacturing systems growing out of the Industrial Revolution reflected the spirit of the day-and yielded a host of unintended yet tragic consequences. Today, with our growing knowledge of the living earth, design can reflect a new spirit. In fact, the authors write, when designers employ the intelligence of natural systems—the effectiveness of nutrient cycling, the abundance of the sun’s energy—they can create products, industrial systems, buildings, even regional plans that allow nature and commerce to fruitfully co-exist. Cradle to Cradle maps the lineaments of McDonough and Braungart’s new design paradigm, offering practical steps on how to innovate within today’s economic environment. Part social history, part green business primer, part design manual, the book makes plain that the re-invention of human industry is not only within our grasp, it is our best hope for a future of sustaining prosperity. In addition to describing the hopeful, nature-inspired design principles that are making industry both prosperous and sustainable, the book itself is a physical symbol of the changes to come. It is printed on a synthetic ‘paper,’ made from plastic resins and inorganic fillers, designed to look and feel like top quality paper while also being waterproof and rugged. And the book can be easily recycled in localities with systems to collect polypropylene, like that in yogurt containers. This ‘treeless’ book points the way toward the day when synthetic books, like many other products, can be used, recycled, and used again without losing any material quality—in cradle to cradle cycles.

William McDonough: The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle

Bill McDonough at Zeitgeist ‘07

Janine Benyus: 12 sustainable design ideas from nature

Ross Lovegrove: The power and beauty of organic design

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Cradle to Cradle Design (sometimes abbreviated to C2C or in some circles referred to as regenerative) is a biomimetic approach to the design of systems. It models human industry on nature’s processes in which materials are viewed as nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms. It suggests that industry must protect and enrich ecosystems and nature’s biological metabolism while also maintaining safe, productive technical metabolism for the high-quality use and circulation of organic and synthetic materials. Put simply, it is a holistic economic, industrial and social framework that seeks to create systems that are not just efficient but essentially waste free.^[1] The model in its broadest sense is not limited to industrial design and manufacturing; it can be applied to many different aspects of human civilisation such as urban environments, buildings, economics and social systems.

The phrase “Cradle to Cradle” itself was coined by Walter R. Stahel in the 1970’s, and the current model is based on a system of “lifecycle development” initiated by Michael Braungart and colleagues at the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA) in the 1990s and explored through the publication A Technical Framework for Life-Cycle Assessment. In partnership with Braungart, William McDonough released the publication Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things in 2002, which is an effective manifesto for Cradle to Cradle Design that gives specific details of how to achieve the model. The model has been implemented by several companies, organisations and governments around the world, particularly in China and the US. Cradle to Cradle has also been the subject matter of many documentary films, including the critically acclaimed Waste=Food.
from Wikkipedia

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http://www.designzoneqatar.com/

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http://www.mcdonough.com/writings_c2c_case_studies.htm

This article originally appeared in The Catalog of the Future (Pearson Press, 2002).

When the architect and theorist Le Corbusier imagined the future of cities from the vantage of the early 20th century, he foresaw a new industrial aesthetic that would free design from the constraints of the natural world. For Le Corbusier, the city was “a human operation directed against nature” and the house was “a machine for living in.” He imagined architecture worldwide shaped by a “mass production spirit.” The ideal: “One single building for all nations and climates.” Le Corbusier’s friends dismissed his futuristic ideas. “All this is for the year 2000,” they said.

It seems they were right. In many ways, our world is LeCorbusier’s world: From Rangoon to Reykjavik one-size-fits-all buildings employ the “engineer’s aesthetic” to overcome the rules of the natural world. As uplifting as that might be for the spirit of LeCorbusier, it is becoming more apparent all the time that buildings conceived as mass-produced machines impoverish cultural diversity and leave their inhabitants cut-off from the wonders and delights of nature.

But what if buildings were alive? What if our homes and workplaces were like trees, living organisms participating productively in their surroundings? Imagine a building, enmeshed in the landscape, that harvests the energy of the sun, sequesters carbon and makes oxygen. Imagine on-site wetlands and botanical gardens recovering nutrients from circulating water. Fresh air, flowering plants, and daylight everywhere. Beauty and comfort for every inhabitant. A roof covered in soil and sedum to absorb the falling rain. Birds nesting and feeding in the building’s verdant footprint. In short, a life-support system in harmony with energy flows, human souls, and other living things. Hardly a machine at all.

This is not science fiction. Buildings like trees, though few in number, already exist. So when we survey the future-the prospects for buildings and cities, settled and unsettled lands-we see a new sensibility emerging, one in which inhabiting a place becomes a mindful, delightful participation in landscape. This perspective is both rigorous and poetic. It is built on design principles inspired by nature’s laws. It is enacted by immersing oneself in the life of a place to discover the most fitting and beautiful materials and forms. It is a design aesthetic that draws equally on the poetics of science and the poetics of space. We hope it is the design strategy of the future.

The Human Leaf
If one unpacks the compressed verse of Einstein-E=MC2-one finds poetry, beauty, the dynamic structure of the universe. Following Einstein’s inimitable lead, we see in E=MC2 a kind of design koan. E is the energy of the sun-physics and planetary motion. M is the mass of the earth-chemistry. When the two interact at the speed of light, biology flourishes and we celebrate its increase-the growth of trees, plants, food, biodiversity and all the cycles of nature that run on the sun. Good growth. And when human systems support ecological health, that’s good growth too.

Applied to design, the laws of nature give architects, designers and planners a set of principles that allow them to articulate in form a building’s or a town’s connection to a particular place. They allow us to create buildings that make the energy of the sun a part of our metabolism and apply it to positive human purpose-the building as “human leaf.” The principles, illustrated by the life of a tree, are:

Waste=Food. The processes of each organism in a living system contribute to the health of the whole. A fruit tree’s blossoms fall to the ground and decompose into food for other living things. Bacteria and fungi feed on the organic waste of both the tree and the animals that eat its fruit, depositing nutrients in the soil in a form ready for the tree to take up and convert into growth. One organism’s waste becomes food for another. Applied to architecture, these cradle-to-cradle nutrient cycles can serve as models for the design of materials and building systems that eliminate the concept of waste. Materials designed for use in cradle-to-cradle cycles, for example, can be either safely returned to the soil or re-utilized as high-quality materials for new products.

Use current solar income. Living things thrive on the energy of the sun. Simply put, a tree manufactures food from sunlight, an elegant, effective system that uses the earth’s only perpetual source of energy income. Buildings that tap into solar income-using direct solar energy collection; passive solar processes such as daylighting; and wind power, which is created by thermal flows fueled by sunlight-make productive and profitable use of local energy flows.

Celebrate diversity. “The tree” provides not just one design model but many. Around the world, photosynthesis and nutrient cycling, adapted to locale, yield an astonishing diversity of forms. Bald cypress, desert palm, and Douglas fir suggest a range of niches. The hundreds of tree species within a single acre of Southern Appalachian forest suggest the diversity of a single region. Architects and planners, applying a diversity of design solutions, can create buildings and cities that fit elegantly and effectively into their own niches.

Kinship with All Life
As architects and planners explore these principles-what amounts to a new conception of design-they will become more adept at creating fit and fitting spaces for human habitation. New benchmarks will emerge. Rather than overpowering nature or limiting human impact, good design will affirm the possibility of developing healthy and creatively interactive relationships between human settlements and the natural world

With new benchmarks will come new practices, and a design process that is now rare will, we hope, become the norm. Design teams in many regions would begin with an assessment of the natural systems of a place-its landforms, hydrology, vegetation, and climate. They would tap into natural and cultural history; investigate local energy sources; explore the cycles of sunlight, shade and water; study the vernacular architecture of the region and the lives of local fauna, flowers and grasses.

Combining an understanding of building and energy systems with this emerging “essay of clues,” designers would discover appropriate patterns for the development of the landscape. Building materials would be selected with the same care, chosen only after a careful assessment of a variety of characteristics, ranging from their chemistry to the impacts of their use, harvesting and manufacture. We might also expect to see the industry-wide pooling of architectural products as builders begin to create closed-loop recycling systems to effectively manage the flow of materials.

With this emphasis on sustaining and enhancing the qualities of the landscape, architectural and community designs would begin to create beneficial ecological footprints-more habitat, wetlands and clean water, not fewer negative emissions. We would see buildings like trees, alive to their surroundings and inhabitants, and cities like forests, in which nature and design create a living, breathing habitat. Vital threads of landscape would provide connectivity between communities, linking urban forests to downtown neighborhoods to riparian corridors to distant wilds. Cities and towns would be shaped and cultivated by an understanding of their singular evolutionary matrix, a new sense of natural and cultural identity that would grow health, diversity and delight, and set the stage for long-term prosperity.

Changes such as these, many already afoot, signal a hopeful new era. Ultimately, they will lead to ever more places that honor not just human ingenuity but harmony with the exquisite intelligence of nature. And when that becomes the hallmark of good design, we will have left behind the century of the machine and begun to celebrate our kinship with all of life.

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Defining Sustainability

Sustainability is a growing concern that affects many facets of our personal and professional lives. If you aren’t clear on what “sustainability” actually means, there are several formal definitions to which we can refer. Sustainability is a big subject, and even a quick glance will reveal a wide range of perspectives. Perhaps one of the most widely recognized definition of sustainability was provided by Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland in her 1987 report, Our Common Future:

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

And whether it’s Al Gore touring the globe to talk about climate change, or Robert Kennedy Jr’s concerns over environmental justice, there is no shortage of high profile commentators on sustainability:

“Sustainability means living on nature’s income rather than its capital.”
—Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize Winner

Other thought leaders have fleshed out these definitions further, some of them providing much more tangible applications and implications:

“Sustainability is an economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by people and commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations. It can also be expressed in the simple terms of an economic golden rule for the restorative economy: leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life of the environment, make amends if you do.”
—Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. 1994

Interestingly, despite his numerous books on the subject, Paul Hawken is still perhaps best known as the entrepreneurial force behind the company that still bears his name (Smith & Hawken). In his capacity as a recognizable business figure, he is not alone in his pioneering approach. In fact, while activists, NGOs, governments and the media all play a role in defining what sustainability means, some of its most vocal and forceful proponents are to be found in the business world:

“What we thought was boundless has limits, and we are beginning to hit them.”
—Robert Shapiro, (former) CEO and chairman of Monsanto, 1997

Yet despite the growing awareness of this way of thinking, my spell checker still doesn’t recognize the word. So right now, “sustainability” is caught in an odd place: in some circles, it has obtained an almost-irritating buzzword status; yet—on the other hand—it has hardly achieved mainstream recognition or understanding. My parents aren’t exactly up to speed on this.

So what will become of it? Will sustainability go the way of Y2K? Is it a business fad soon to be replaced by something else in a marketplace constantly looking for that “next thing”? A remark by Thomas Jefferson over 200 years ago provides contrary evidence to this possibility. The ethic he described demonstrates that although the term “sustainable development” is new, the concept has been around for a long time:

“Then I say the earth belongs to each… generation during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and encumbrances, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.”
—Thomas Jefferson, Third US President, guy found on nickels, 1789

Moving forward, the Center for Sustainable Design will be trying to provide a succinct definition that speaks directly to designers. To get that ball rolling, we would like to hear from you. What does sustainability mean to you as a designer?

For further reading, the resources section of this site features several well written books on the topic. You can also take a look at these links for a deeper dive:

http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/sustain/overview.php

Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development:
http://www.complusalliance.org/templates/Complus2/layout.asp?type=p&MenuId=NDg4

Posted by sustainability in Ideas | December 22, 2006

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